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9—EXPOSE YOURSELF
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“Expose yourself to the circumstances of His choice.”
This little phrase, which has stood by many a climbing soul, seems to have been coined for our picture of great circumstances, confusion of the skies has been so wonderfully captured that we all but see the movement and hear the wind that rushes past. The cloud in the picture is sunlit, but with an awful speed it may cover the face of the mountain with darkness. Mist, rain, snow—the cloud may bring them all, and the precipice falls away at our feet. “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy”—there speaks the spiritual mountaineer.
No parable shows everything: no climber among the precipices purposely exposes himself to stormy wind, and he does not willingly walk into cloud. But spiritual mountaineers must; and at such an hour there must be “some perseverance when we are tired, some resoluteness not to let ourselves off easily,” something akin to the spirit of the world’s mountaineers, “a spirit firm and tenacious and ambitious enough to drive on the body to its seemingly last extremity.” There is no such thing as an easy or a sheltered climb. But “what know they of harbors who toss not on the sea?” And what know they of succor who have never ventured in difficult places? We shall press through the mist and the smothering snow; we shall climb and not give way; for there is One Invisible with us, “and with every call of every hour His word is, let us go hence.’”
“Us”: and we take this word in faith, just as we take such words as “The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear Him and delivereth them,” in faith. But the line between the seen and the unseen is as narrow as ever it was (a line is without breadth)—and even now, at times, God does as He did when He opened the eyes of the young man and he saw; and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. Why should it not be so? The powers of the Eternal are not bound between the covers of His Book.
If there be something which appears to explain this flash of spiritual awareness, it is discredited and called “illusion.” But he who was made aware of the presence of Another, an Unseen Companion, in some hour of supreme need, very humbly but very surely knows that it was no illusion. He speaks of his experience with diffidence (because so few will understand), but never with uncertainty.
But the call is to the walk of faith, for we walk by faith, not by sight. (It would be sight if our spiritual senses were constantly quickened so that like that young man at Dothan we “saw.”) And as we “go hence,” refusing no roughness, no steepness, no danger, and caring not at all what the weather is, or what it threatens to be, we know that we are not alone on the mountain.